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I N N O V A T O R | News about high school innovation
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Sept. 7, 2010
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Welcome to INNOVATOR, a bimonthly report on high school change in North Carolina from the North Carolina New Schools Project. INNOVATOR informs practitioners, policy makers, and friends of public education about high school innovation in North Carolina as well as success stories and research from across the nation.
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More students enroll in innovative high schools in 2010-11
Upwards of 25,000 students are returning to class this fall in high schools that are being transformed by approaches to teaching and learning that aim to better prepare them for college, careers and life in the 21st century.
In all, 107 innovative high schools with current and former ties to the North Carolina New Schools Project are open statewide, from Murphy in the west to Buxton in the east. A new early college high school in Havelock with a focus on aerospace technology -- the second early college in Craven County -- raises to 71 the number of pioneering hybrid high schools in the state. Students in early colleges are able to earn both a high school diploma and an associate's degree or two years of college credit within four or five years. North Carolina remains the national leader in early college high schools, accounting for about a third of all the schools across the country. Even as 18 of the state's first innovative high schools begin the year without the initial grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that helped with their launch, the schools are continuing this year as small-school models. Some of them may receive renewed support under funding from the state's Race to the Top initiative, awarded last month by the U.S. Department of Education. Statewide, students in 72 of the state's 115 school districts now have an option of attending an innovative high school, either at small, redesigned high school that's been subdivided from a former traditional high school or at an early college. Forty-two of the state's community colleges host at least one early college, as do five four-year colleges and universities. Back to top |
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Avery builds on homegrown innovation with NCNSP's help
School leaders in rural Avery County have turned to the North Carolina New Schools Project to strengthen their own efforts to transform Avery County High into a school where all students graduate well prepared.
The district is contracting with NCNSP this year for an array of services at the high school, including instructional coaching for classroom teachers, leadership coaching for school administrators and access to a growing network of other innovative high schools that are partners with NCNSP.
Innovation is nothing new at Avery County High School, which began several years ago to break the mold on its own, taking steps to ensure students had the opportunity to earn college credit while still in high school. Through an arrangement at Mayland Community College, where about a dozen of Avery High's teachers are also now adjunct faculty, students have been able to take community college courses on the high school campus. That arrangement has worked so well that of the 169 members of the class of 2010, about 90 percent of them had earned at least some college credit and a quarter of the class earned a full year of transferrable credit.
Last year, in a separate effort, the Avery County district joined with Mitchell and Yancey counties in a partnership with Mayland Community College to open an early college high school serving students from all three districts.
"Dual enrollment was the best thing I've ever seen," said Mark Garrett, Avery County High School's principal, who introduced the innovative approach as an alternative to Advanced Placement courses, which were difficult to offer because of the school's small size. "Being a
small school didn't have to be a reason not to offer things."
Building on that foundation of successful experimentation, the school has begun breaking up what had been a single, traditional model into three separate schools. Starting with a freshman academy last year, the upper grades this year are divided into a school of leadership and public service and a school with a focus on STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math.)
"We want to make sure that we offer students as many opportunities as we can for a relevant high school experience," said Avery Superintendent Keith Eades, who was involved in the creation of Mayland Early College High School and also J.P. Knapp Early College in Currituck County when he was an administrator there.
To Garrett, smaller high schools are more effective in ensuring that students are connected.
"It's much harder to get lost," he said. "To me that's the
bottom line to getting kids on track. That's a lot of what led us to this path."
He sees promise in the first year's results from the freshman academy, from which all but seven of about 150 students were promoted, but is looking for NCNSP's assistance to make sure that such progress doesn't stall.
"How do you get from an 82 percent graduation rate to 100 percent? How
do you keep from going backwards?" he asks. Garrett said he hopes that opportunities to learn from other NCNSP schools will help the school to continue moving forward.
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Cumberland, Guilford in US top 10 for black male graduation
A new report ranks Cumberland and Guilford county school districts among large districts in the U.S. for graduating black male students at rates above the national average. Both of the North Carolina districts have focused heavily in recent years on high school innovation, including the creation of pioneering early college and redesigned high schools.
The report, Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, 2010, is based on graduation rates for the class of 2008 and eighth grade reading scores from the 2009 National Assessment. The 2008 graduation rates for black male students in both Cumberland and Guilford lag behind the rates for white male students, reflecting a similar gap nationally, but were above the nation's rate of 47 percent. Data for the class of 2010 reported by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction show a graduation rate for black males and females of 73.7 percent in Cumberland and 75.5 percent in Guilford. The rate statewide was 66.9 percent, compared to 74.2 percent for all students and 79.6 percent for white students. The report and a news story about it in the Greensboro News & Record prompted an editorial in that paper that singled out the Early/Middle College at N. C. A&T State University for the strong graduation performance of the school's class of 2010. The school's enrollment is all male and most of the students are black. Back to top |
State Board may require ACT for NC high school students ...
Students in 11th grade would be required to take the ACT college entrance exam under a plan the State Board of Education will consider for approval next month.The tests would be used both as a tool for measuring school performance and as means to identify students needing extra help to ensure readiness for college and careers. The proposal also calls for ACT pre-tests for students in eighth and 10th grades. Of eight states that currently require a nationally recognized post-secondary readiness exam for high school students, five use the ACT. Back to top
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... National initiative aims to overhaul multiple-choice tests
North Carolina is among 44 states participating in two multi-state efforts to design new tests that would assess higher-order skills such as the ability to read complex texts, synthesize information and do research projects. The 31-state group of which North Carolina is a member, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, was awarded $160 million last week by the U.S. Department of Education for the project, which is keyed to a set of common academic standards in English and math that North Carolina and most states have adopted. "Through this grant, we will have the opportunity to develop an innovative assessment system aligned with the Common Core State Standards," State Superintendent June Atkinson said after the grant was awarded. "This system will help teachers to keep students on track to graduate college- and career-ready." The New York Times reported that the U.S. Department of Education is spending $330 million in all during the next four years on the two projects, which will involve hundreds of university professors and testing experts to design the new computer-based assessments. The paper reported that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said during a speech Thursday that the new series of tests are to be ready for use by the 2014-15 school year. "The use of smarter technology in assessments," Duncan was quoted as saying, "makes it possible to assess students by asking them to design products or experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests and record data." Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the paper that the new tests could have a dramatic impact on assessments. "If these plans work out, it'll turn the current testing system upside down," he said. Back to top
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Look for NCNSP on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
The latest updates from the North Carolina New Schools Project and partner schools can now be found on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Don't wait. Join the converation now. Just click on the links above to follow NCNSP. Back to top
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INNOVATOR is produced
by the North Carolina New Schools Project, an initiative of the Office of the
Governor and the Education Cabinet with the support of the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation and other businesses and foundations. For story suggestions or to opt out of receiving
this e-mail report, please send an e-mail to innovator@newschoolsproject.org or call Todd
Silberman at (919) 277-3760.
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